Microsoft's Non-advertising Advertising with Jerry Seinfeld

In an attempt to distance themselves form almost everyting, Microsoft have released an advert featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The advert is like the Seinfeld observation about the advert for Dockers that didn't mention the product.

The advert does not mention any of Microsoft's products and features a rather wooden Bill Gates. That Bill Gates is prepared to appear in a rather wooden fashion looking rather geekish is something but otherwise the advert is completely pointless.

Whereas pointlessness was the point of the Seinfeld comedy series, Microsoft is facing stiffer and stiffer competition and, despite its near monopoly is having a job justifying its operating systems and office suites in a time of increased possibilites made through the web.

Apple has done a good job of beginning to take back market share form Microsoft in recent years. As their handheld devices work and work well, so the public's trust in the Apple brand increases. Likewise, Google is muscling in on Microsoft's turf with a new free browser. Furthermore, Linux is becoming more important as an operating system platform.

In short, Microsoft's market is being eroded and the need for packaged software products are dwindling in an age where more and more applications are web based and Microsoft has a shrinking share of the web.

With this in mind, does a quirky, pointless advert just make Microsoft appear quirky & pointless?

What do you think?

Google's Real Problems

As search engine optimisers, we get the impression that a search engine's biggest nightmare is the work we carry out. Not only is this egotistical but it is also untrue. Most optimisers try to give the sites they work with the best possible rankings for what they have and, in so doing, help to show the sites that are serious about their web presence, and make sites more accessible to the search engines and to people with all abilities and disabilities.

'Black Hat' search engine marketers might cause Google to miss a step occasionally as they find ways to fool the search engines but these efforts are short-lived and the brainpower of Google's 100 Doctors of Philosophy are either a step ahead or ready to react quickly.

In truth, Google's problems are much more mundane than industrial espionage or seditious optimisation practices: the main problem is that of scale.

Scale has been a constraint for all kinds of organisations and empires throughout time - the Romans were hampered by their limited mathematical abilities and could not grow beyond the limits of around 100AD and the British Empire found itself becoming the world's policeman, a title that came at a tremendous cost. Likewise, Google's size gives it tremendous problems. Here are a few that you may not have considered.

Breakdowns: It is estimated that Google runs 500,000 servers. At any one time there are going to be several machines that have gone down. Mechanical problems mount up and even if 1 in 1000 servers fails completely in a given year, that's 500 to be changed. With our experience with computers, things go wrong all the time & Google might expect 1000 servers to be down at any one time.

Power: Google has 3 main datacentres, each of which chew through power at around $5000 per hour. Such massive power usage causes massive headaches. Google has recently invested in solar power and put time & money into RE

Revenues: Furthermore, search is a costly area with an estimated 85% of searches being non-commercial and thus difficult to wrap advertising around. Google only has one tried-and-tested means of making money - advertising. But for that, they do not have a business. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, with the rise of other media like Video, more and more people are interacting with the Internet without needing search engines; they can get their information and products by interacting with friends rather than by asking a search engine a limited or clunky question. Google has to try hard to preserve its revenue stream - it has grown fat on search revenues and shareholders will demand that they continue to grow and do not get syphoned off by other Internet companies.

Costs: There are massive costs involved in search. Apart from the employment costs (of Google's 100+ doctorates), the costs of machinery, power and research are limiting.

Data: Google's index has grown to 20 billion pages, a gigantic amount. It takes 6 weeks for them to index the sites on the Internet. This amount of data, however, is dwarfed by the 1 trillion pages that they know about. If your dataset is 2% of the data that is on the Internet then you have to ber VERY good at indexing the right data or else searchers will go elsewhere. Google has to be sure that it provides the results that people will find useful very quickly or else users will go elsewhere - too much information and there will be spam and drivel in the index and too little and searchers will miss out on the Internet's variety.

Furthermore, the Internet is growing massively. With Web 2.0 applications like blogs that allow people to quickly & easily publish their information on the Internet (this blog is just one example), the Internet has grown exponentially. Around 140 million people were online in 1998 when Google Inc started compared to 1.4 billion today according to internetworldstats.com and all of them have access to publishing tools that were not available 2 or 3 years ago. There is the problem that the amound of information online might grow in excess of Moore's Law (the rule of thumb used by the founder of Intel in 1965 which basically stated that the number of transistors on an integrated surface doubles every 18 months). This means that if the amount of information on the Internet doubles in less than 18 months, Google either takes longer to compile and analyse the data or it must invest in more & more computing power.

Even more troubling is the problem of infinite scalability. I do not know the limits of technology but there must be significant software problems in co-ordinating the data on 500,000 servers and there must be a limit to the complexity of such a system. With a rapidly growing dataset with which to compute, Google is at the limits of the possible as far as computing is concerned.

These problems of scale mean that Google spends more and more time and money worrying about physical constraints than about giving the best search results that get the most advertising revenues. Will the company be able to continue to grow beyond these constraints and keep searchers & shareholders happy? Will they be able to continue to try to take market share from companies like Microsoft on browsers that do not earn them any money? Time will tell.

Thanks to Leslie Rhode & Andy Edmonds for their opinions.

Enough of the new search engines - how about a new browser?

There have been a number of interesting search engine offerings over the last few months and we wanted to write about something new.

Increasingly, we are finding that customers are interacting with the Internet in different ways and that their next purchase might not necessarily come from an interaction with a search engine. Video now dwarfs search with 10 billion pieces of online video were viewed in December 2007 & with 141 million Americans viewing video online every month (did you ever wonder why Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube?) as does social networking (with over 100 million people using Facebook alone). The common elements to all of these facets of customer interaction is the brpwser as everyone needs a browser to use video, social media and the search engines.

If the aim of the game is to influence people as early as possible during their Internet experience then the browser hould be one of the most important things. Browser wars, however, are old hat - Netscape bowed out of the race years ago and today Internet Explorer & Firefox have the market sewn up between them (IE had 72.15% of the market & Mozilla 19.83% in August 2008 according to hitslink.com). In this environment, a move by Google came out of left field. That said, moving into the browser seems like a logical step for a company like Google which needs to protect its advertising revenues.

This move could have real repurcussions for Mozilla which, until now has had a close relationship with Google (their offices are across the road from Google's) and, as such, might show Google's intent to topple Microsoft's dominance. If this is the case, then the next logical step to influence people beofre they are online is for Google to release an open source operating system. You heard it here first.

The assault on 'Party Products' - The High Seas Part 1

We thought you might be interested in a serialisation of how we mount an assault on the search engines. This might give you ideas about how to promote your own website as well as giving you a chance to gague our own success. We've been working with a company called The Party Catalogue recently and we've picked out a number of keywords that we want to see them rank for. For this serialisation, we've picked two keywords for the homepage, party products and party supplies.

We hope you enjoy reading about the rise & fall of the company on the high seas of Google & look forward to seeing what happens. We've done a bit of preliminary work on the website & the site has begun to show up - a Google UK search currently reveals position 85 for party supplies & 19 for party products.

Search Engine optimisation is shrouded in mystery and we aim to remove that mystery & we hope you'll be interested in the results. From our studies, we know that being on the front page of Google can mean getting five times as many visitors as being on the second page and so there is the potential for revenues to increase by 5 times. That said, the top spot on Google can have 3 times as much traffic as lower spots on the first page and so competition is fierce.



Some Cold, Hard Facts:

On average, there are 595 searches a day for the keyword party supplies and 160 for party products.

We are competing against 15,700,000 & 21,200,000 other sites respectively & so we're not doing too badly to start with.




If you'd like to help and you have a web page or a blog, please put the following code into it:



and lo, we might make a difference.

Cuil - the future of search...again

With search eninges being the gateway to knowledge and power on the Internet and with the massive amounts of money that can be generated through controlling this, it is not surprising that there are young pretenders jockeying for positioning.

Search engines live or die by the information they can provide. If you search for something and don't get what you want you will go somewhere else. If you search and find spam the search eninge will get a bad name and will lose market share, money and the eyes & ears of a legion of fans.

Cuil is one of these young pretenders. It claims the largest index (120) billion pages and it is developed by former Google search engine developers. The budget for the search engine was arounnd $30m which pales next to Google's billions but small & nimble is often an advantage in the Web 2.0 world.


Verdict:

Results are laid out pleasingly in columns with pictures to give an added sense of what is happening.
Form a small sample, results seem less spammy.

It's Official - Paid Links Can Harm You

After the recent drop in the rankings of certain directories, it seemed that Google was on a mission to cut out the practice of webmasters paying for premium listings on websites. A recent update to the Google Webmaster section now shows this to be true:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Google's arguement is that paid links can create inequity in searches with the people with the deepest pockets being able to buy prestige which does not correspond to their standing or merit within the community.

Buying and selling links does have a place, especially in directories that need to invest time & effort analysing their content but links sold purely for advertising purposes have no place in Google's new world and sites found exercising this practice will be penalised.

Localise your website

It is often very difficult to make your website's local advantege count for anything. UK-based companies look to find advantages to having a UK-based website but don't want to be seen as UK-only enterprises nor do they like beign lost in the global results that many search engines can give.

Last week, Google began to offer a solution. Business location can be registered through Google Webmaster Central. In the tools tab, thee is an option to set the geographic location.

This is especially helpful if businesses trade over the web with a .com domain or if large companies have country-specific sites.

Goes Google Count Clicks Against a Search to Weight its Algorithm?

One issue that has come to light recently is: "Does Google count the number of clicks to different sites in a search and use it to weight its rankings?". The theory is that if your page is number 2 in the search but gets more clicks than the number one site, Google might rank your site more favourably.

There are a number of reasons to suspect why this might be the case:

Relevance: Search engines thrive on producing relevant results. The more relevant the result to the search, the easier it is for someone to find what they are looking for using a particular search engine.

Adwords: Googles Adwords will weight adverts that get a higher clickthrough ratio. If you have two adverts for a particular product and one gets twice the clickthrough rate, then Google will show this more often. Again, relevance is involved. If an advert is more relevant (it must be if more people click on it) then search engines need to show this more often to improve the user experience.

The problem with this theory is that there is no way to verify it other than by anecdotal evidence. There will be a host of factors that bring your site a good ranking and anyone of these could make a difference. Furthermore, a link may be clicked on but users could 'bounce' straight away if they realise that the site is not what they'd wanted.

The best thing to remember is that once you're in the top 10 and certainly the top 5 you've made it. Traffic increases massively if you are ranked on the front page. It won't necessarily matter if you are 2nd 3rd or 4th if the description used against your site isn't relevant or enticing. If your description is well written, relevant and useful you will get people coming to your site. It's as simple as that.

Selling Links - Not the way to go.

With a lot of chatter, arguement and debate on the subject of paid links, the debates seemed to have reignited this week wen it came to light that Google have confirmed they are penalising sites that sell links.

Paid links, those that are put on a site in return for a fee, have often been a way of raising a site's credibility, PageRank and exposure extremely quickly. The problem with this is that the democratic nature of search engines is usurped by those with the most money to splash around. If we imagine a Google search as a democratic system where the most popular sites appear at the top of the rankings, links become votes. The more links to a site, the more search engines perceive it as a destination, a place people want to go to. When money exchanges hands, extra votes can be bought and extra influence & greater standing in the search engine ranks can be gained.

There is a case to be made for paid links. For one, Google uses paid links to conduct its Adwords campaign and links are a highly valuable advertising tool. The differene between these adverts and paid links, however, is that adverts are often clearly marked. In a newspaper, adverts are separated from content & media owners disassociate themselves from the advertised content. The media outlet isn't recommending a product in an advert, the advertiser is. Paid links muddy this issue in order to work. In order to influence Google's PageRank system, these links must be like any other on a website. the advertised content and the publised content are indistinguishable.

Danny Sulliavan reported at Search Engine Land that Google have begun to talk about lowering the PageRank of those companies that have been selling links and it would appear that they intend to do this more in the future. It would be hard to identify a lot of the sites that sell links but it is not a valuable long-term strategy as far as search engine optimization is concerned as the penalties are reduced visibility in the Search Engines but, more importantly, lowered trust within your community, something that can tarnish you for a long time. There is no real sens in mixing up paid content & free content & it gives a skweed view of the Internet if you link to sites whose only intrinsic value is the money that the links were bought with.


Adverts but without advertising

Mantra for all website owners

I read an interesting passage in one of Dan Thies's books the other day which said:

Search engines don’t care about you, they don’t care about your website, but they do care about their customers. If I get what I’m looking for when I use a search engine, I’ll use it again. Search engines are trying to deliver the most relevant resultspossible for every search.

It sounds harsh but it's excellent advice for anyone trying to create a website that needs to be plugged in to search engines. When thinking about your company's website, be sure to build it with your customers and with the search engines in mind. It is all very well wanting a snazzy or 'flashy' site as it makes you look good but if there is no content, users will not stay around ling & the search engines will not look favourably on your hard work.

This is where some of the sites I have been asked to look at recently have come unstuck. If you look at the Ice Cricket website or the party supplies website, you will notice that they are all light on text-based content. As a result, they will fall behind sites that provide up-to-date detailed text-based content in the long-run.

If you're thinking of designing a website for any reason, please let me know & I'll try to help you where I can.